Oracle Bones (50 page)

“It’s like the Greek idea of the barbarians,” he says. “Those who are living within the city are civilized; those who are living outside of it are barbarians.
functions like that. And the city walls are square, basically. They were rectangular in the Shang, but it’s essentially the same shape. There were never any round walls or any other shape. The Chinese must have had some very ingrained notion of what the world should look like.”

He continues: “Maybe twenty or thirty years ago, the conductor of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra said something about Chinese music. He said that the music sounded like Chinese characters. What he meant was that the sound came in chunks. He said that Western music is not that way.

“When I heard this, I thought, what is he talking about? But when I was working on this idea of squareness, I suddenly thought that maybe it’s not so far off. He was describing music as chunks instead of as a flow. It’s very impressionistic, but I thought that perhaps he is hitting something really deep down in the primordial level of consciousness.”

MORE THAN A
year later, while reading David N. Keightley’s
Sources of Shang History
, I reach page sixty-six, paragraph two. The first sentence is long and crawling with commas—a swarm of words across the page. One catches my eye:

The standard introduction to oracle-bone grammar, despite its unsystematic and dated nature, is still the chrestomathy of Chen Mengjia, which leads the student through word order, particles, time words, pronouns, verbs, modifiers, numbers, demonstratives, connectives, prepositions, auxiliary verbs, negatives, omissions and abbreviations, and sentence types.

And even later, when I meet Professor Takashima again, he mentions that a Czech scholar named David Sehnal has successfully cracked a cattle scapula. The key was placing charcoal next to the bone and then blowing on it to make it even hotter. In the Czech Republic, the voice of the cracked bone sounded exactly the same as it had in Seattle:
Pok pok pok pok!

15

Translation

April 1, 2001

IN THE WORLD OF U.S.-CHINA RELATIONS, IT WAS POSSIBLE FOR A
disagreement to begin with a plane wreck and then, over the course of eleven days, to become distilled to an adverb and a noun. The event could have been an exercise in linguistics, or perhaps a fable—something out of
Chuang Tzu
, the ancient Taoist classic:

Once upon a time Chuang Chou dreamed that he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting about happily enjoying himself. He didn’t know that he was Chou. Suddenly he awoke and was palpably Chou. He did not know whether he was Chou who had dreamed of being a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming that he was Chou. Now, there must be a difference between Chou and the butterfly. This is called the transformation of things.

ONCE UPON A
time, on the morning of April 1, 2001, two military planes collided in international airspace high above the South China Sea. One plane was American, the other Chinese. The Chinese craft—an F-8 fighter—was badly damaged. The American plane was bigger: a Navy EP-3E Aries II, designed to gather the electronic communications of foreign militaries. After the collision, the Navy plane plummeted nearly eight thousand feet, regained control, and requested permission to make an emergency landing on China’s Hainan Island. Airport control didn’t respond; the plane landed anyway. The Ameri
can crew consisted of twenty-four men and women, who were promptly taken into custody by the People’s Liberation Army.

The Chinese F-8 was piloted by a thirty-three-year-old lieutenant named Wang Wei. His plane crashed into the sea.

None of these events was witnessed by an independent, nonmilitary observer.

Within hours, government officials of each country presented very different descriptions of the incident.

Neither nation’s top leader issued a statement on the first day.

ON APRIL 2,
President George W. Bush spoke. This was the first major foreign policy test of his presidency. The American media speculated that this incident could set the tone for the Bush administration’s future dealings with the outside world.

Standing on the White House lawn, the president did not apologize for the collision, and he did not express condolences to the family of Wang Wei. His words were straightforward: “Our priorities are the prompt and safe return of the crew and the return of the aircraft without further tampering.”

The president expressed concern that U.S. embassy personnel had not been allowed to meet with the American crew: “Failure of the Chinese government to react promptly to our request is inconsistent with standard diplomatic practice and with the expressed desire of both our countries for better relations.”

Earlier, Admiral Dennis Blair, of the U.S. Pacific Command, had told reporters in Honolulu that there had been a “pattern of increasingly unsafe behavior” by Chinese pilots above the South China Sea.

AT THE BEGINNING,
no high-ranking Chinese leaders made a public statement. That was typical: just as American values demanded a leader to act quickly, the Chinese generally waited for the wheels of bureaucracy to turn. And the plane incident had occurred at a particularly sensitive time. Beijing still awaited a decision on its Olympic bid, and the country was in the final stages of its application to join the World Trade Organization. Unlike in 1999, the government did not encourage or allow student demonstrations.

On April 4, President Jiang Zemin made his first statement, carried by the official Xinhua news agency: “The United States should do something favorable to the smooth development of China-U.S. relations rather than make remarks that confuse right and wrong and are harmful to the relations between the two countries.”

In Beijing, the Chinese foreign minister issued an official demand for
an apology. Later that day, a high-ranking American official used the word “regret” for the first time. Secretary of State Colin Powell said, “We regret that the Chinese plane did not get down safely and we regret the loss of life of that Chinese pilot but now we need to move on and we need to bring this to a resolution.”

On April 4, the
Beijing Youth Daily
ran a page-one headline:

PROOF OF BULLYING

On April 5, the
New York Times
ran a page-one headline:

BEIJING STEPS UP ITS WAR OF WORDS OVER
AIR COLLISION

On April 6, an American official announced that the two sides were drafting a formal letter that would end the crisis.

CHUANG TZU:

Writing is that means by which the world values the Way, but writing is no more than words and words, too, have value. Meaning is what gives value to words, but meaning is dependant on something. What meaning depends on cannot be expressed in language, yet the world transmits writing because it values language. Although the world values writing, I, for my part, do not think it worthy of being valued, because what is valued is not what is really valuable.

O
N
A
PRIL 9,
President Bush said that “diplomacy takes time.”

The Chinese foreign minister said, “The U.S. side must apologize to China and adopt measures to ensure this sort of event will not reoccur.”

The media of the two countries continued to describe the incident in completely different ways. The Chinese claimed that the American plane had swerved to collide with the F-8; American military officials claimed that the smaller Chinese craft had initiated the contact. For months, the Americans said, Chinese pilots had flown close to the surveillance planes, in an apparent attempt at intimidation.

Chinese military and commercial craft continued to search for Wang Wei in the waters of the South China Sea.

Reportedly, the letter was still being written.

ON APRIL 10,
the Reverend Jesse Jackson offered to fly to China and assist in negotiations.

DURING THE CRISIS,
as neither government said much of substance, the media of both countries used numbers to fill out stories. Each followed its own national obsession: Americans conducted polls; Chinese accumulated statistics. An ABC/
Washington Post
-sponsored survey asked the question: “Should the U.S. apologize?”

Xinhua reported that the search for Wang Wei involved 115 planes, more than one thousand ship patrols, and covered more than three hundred thousand square kilometers of ocean. That was more than eleven times larger than the Beijing city surface area that had been repainted for the I.O.C. inspection.

I KNEW ONLY
three people named Wang Wei. One was an artist; another was an archaeologist; the third ran a bookstore. I should have known more. Wang Wei, my artist friend, knew five Wang Weis, and each of those Wang Weis probably knew five more, and each of them probably knew another five. Somebody named Wang Wei could be a man or a woman, urban or rural, rich or poor. The character for Wei could be
People in China do not use phonebooks in part because of names like Wang Wei.

CHUANG TZU:

A fish-trap is for catching fish; once you’ve caught the fish, you can forget the trap. A rabbit-snare is for catching rabbits; once you’ve caught the rabbit, you can forget about the snare. Words are for catching ideas; once you’ve caught the idea, you can forget about the words. Where can I find a person who knows how to forget about words so that I can have a few words with him?

ON APRIL 11,
both sides finally agreed on the letter. It had taken nearly a week to write 236 English words. Reportedly, the letter had passed through at least four drafts, and the final day of negotiations had resulted in the addition of a single adverb: “very.” Off the record, some U.S. officials described it as “the letter of two ‘very sorrys.’”

The American ambassador in Beijing signed the letter. It read, in part:

Both President Bush and Secretary of State Powell have expressed their sincere regret over your missing pilot and aircraft.

Please convey to the Chinese people and to the family of pilot Wang Wei that we are very sorry for their loss.